SHOT FROM BEHIND: YET AGAIN.. ANOTHER UNARMED LATINO KILLED BY POLICE

Street memorial for SFPD murder victim Amilcar Perez Lopez

Report by Oliver Laughland in San Francisco / The Guardian, U.K.

Amilcar Perez-Lopez was a 20-year-old Guatemalan immigrant shot to death
by police officers who said he lunged at them with a knife. Eyewitnesses, after being ‘driven underground’,
say he was running for his life.

Outside the Red Poppy Art House in San Francisco’s Mission district, a newly painted mural
glows in the afternoon sun. Two of the men etched on the wall are instantly recognisable: to
the right stands Eric Garner, the unarmed black man killed by police in New York City; Michael Brown,
the unarmed black teenager killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, stands to the left. But framed
in the middle is a face hardly anyone from beyond the streets of this historically working class
area would have ever noticed.

Amilcar Perez-Lopez was 20 years old when he was shot dead by two plain-clothed San Francisco
police officers in February. An undocumented migrant and Guatemalan national, he is pictured at
the bottom of the mural, his hands up, clutching a copy of Huey P Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide.
He was killed two blocks away from the mural. The gallery’s owners heard the gunshots.

Perez-Lopez was one of 67 Latinos identified by the Guardian as killed by police so
far this year. Like 58% of them, he carried no firearm; 25% were completely unarmed. Yet his death
and those of all the other Latino 67 have failed to spark the kind of outrage seen after the deaths
of Garner and Brown. Those who witnessed the event...